JARDIN DE CAMÉLIAS

HIGH JEWELLERY

SPIRIT OF THE COLLECTION

The new High Jewellery collection, Jardin de Camélias, celebrates the creative effervescence of CHANEL Fine Jewellery with almost a hundred variations on the theme that was so dear to Mademoiselle. It is a bewildering exercise in style and technical excellence where volumes, influences and materials unite to create exceptional jewellery.

A real aesthetic challenge, the Jardin de Camélias collection is the elegant expression of CHANEL’S extraordinary jewellery making savoir faire at the whim of its flourishing imagination.

MADEMOISELLE CHANELAND THE CAMELLIA

From the 1920s, Gabrielle Chanel made the camellia one of her favourite accessories, wearing it as a brooch on her shoulder or in her hair. Even though she found inspiration from the male wardrobe of that time, she actually borrowed the curved form of the camellia theme from the gentlemen of the previous century. They favoured the camellia as a buttonhole because of its absence of smell. Mademoiselle Chanel liked to wear the unisex flower for the same reason, since it did not compete with her perfume, the famous No°5.

Above all, it was the beauty and natural elegance of the camellia's geometric curves that led Mademoiselle Chanel to make it her signature. Almost perfectly round, the flower retains its leaves through the changing seasons, a rare characteristic that symbolises purity and long life.In her apartment at 31 rue Cambon, the reoccurring motif of its petals graced her Coromandel screens, lamps, mirrors, and was sculpted as a bouquet in rock crystal. Sumptuous in its simplicity, the white flower she chose as an icon has been a recurrent theme throughout Chanel's history.